Sochi 2014 Social Media Metrics

SOCHI, RUSSIA and LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND—
Between Olympic athletes and fans, the Sochi 2014
Olympic Winter Games generated around 2 billion social media impressions across
all Olympic platforms.

The International
Olympic Committee tracked social media activity on the Olympic
Athletes’ Hub, the IOC’s social media platform that combines feeds from
more than 6,000 Olympians across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The
metrics included mentions, likes, shares, photos and interactions across
these platforms and VKontakte, the most popular social network in
the world for Russian speakers.

More than 2
million new fans joined the Olympic Facebook page during the Olympic
Games, the Olympic Twitter account amassed 168,101 new followers, the
Olympic Instagram account gained more than 150,000 new followers, and VK
saw over 650,000 new fans join the Olympic page, with a total of 3
million visitors in total during February 2014.

· The United
States as the most active team participating in social media activity,
logging 22,598 posts across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the
Games. Canada and Great Britain followed with 15,716 and 9,867 posts
respectively

· The most
commonly used hashtag during the Olympics was #sochi2014, with almost
11,000 uses in the Hub’s feed. Rounding out the top five were
#wearewinter, #teamusa, #olympics, #goaus and #wirfuerD

· The most
@mentions across all social feeds were @cdnolympicteam, with over 2,000,
followed by @teamgb, @sochi2014, @usolympicn and @pechalatbourzat

· The busiest
days were Feb. 7, the day of the Opening Ceremony, and Feb. 8,
when the figure skating team competition and women’s free style skiing
moguls took place.

The host country
also got behind its home Olympic Games through social media. The Olympic
page on VK was established a year ago. Today it is the most popular
official community on the platform, with over 2.8 million fans. More than 54
million Olympic mentions were made during the Sochi Games on VK, an
average of 1.5 million mentions a day. Ten million of those mentions
occurred during the Opening Ceremony, and 25 million during the Closing
Ceremony.

Top Russian
athletes – including Adelina Sotnikova, Yulia Lipnitskaya and Evgeni
Plushenko – gained over 400,000 new followers during the Olympic Games.

Gold medallist and
figure skating sensation Lipnitskaya became the No. 1 Olympic celebrity
on VK with over 700,000 likes posted on her wall, and over 2 million
likes of her photos in a single photo album.